Curriculum Integration

In the third meeting of the Making, Art(s) and Design Inquiry Group we continued feedback and support on Portfolio and Reflection practices, introduced Career Connections and discussed how these can be applied in a cross-curricular way throughout different grades and classes.

In the second meeting for the Making, Art(s) and Design Inquiry Group held last week, we continued to build on our reflection, critique and portfolio practices, and introduced examples of Critique Protocols. As mentioned in the last blog post, the purpose of these meetings is to discuss integrating portfolio work and documentation, possibly in a…

Staff members from the Lighthouse Making, Art(s) and Design Inquiry Group met last week, led by our electives coordinator, Brianna Shahvar, to discuss integrating portfolios and documentation into each of our classes. The purpose of this process is to encourage students to document their own thinking, to look more closely at their projects and/or products,…

We recently had our annual King of the Hill competition with our 12th grade Physics students! Each year our Physics students build mousetrap cars as they begin to study forces and motion. The first round of cars don’t work very well; the students don’t really know yet what it takes to make a durable and…

As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, we have been partnering for a while now with Agency by Design (AbD), a research group out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero. As we dive in to this work, we’ve been exploring ways that making not only creates space for play and creativity in…

For the past month, the 3rd grade classes here at Lighthouse have been exploring a unit on electricity during science. While many lesson plans have students end a unit like this by exploring with and making real circuits, our teachers Lauren Hofmayer and Zoe Sylvester have decided to flip this on it’s head by having have their students…

In this new feature, we will give a quick summary of the different Making projects happening each week throughout the school. We will also spotlight specific projects in more detail in other posts. Read on to learn about all the ways our teachers are integrating Making into our classrooms! The kindergarteners continued a woodworking unit during their…

This past weekend we co-hosted a “Designing Making Experiences” professional development session at Castilleja School in Palo Alto. We offer several of these workshops a year, with the goal of helping attendees integrate making into their curriculum. For two days, participants ideate, collaborate, and prototype a project that they can bring back to their classrooms. Here are…

The 2nd graders at Lighthouse are spending the next few weeks learning about habitats of the Bay area and how animals adapt to live in them. Since we have a weekly making time, we decided to do an integrated curriculum making project. The kids (in groups of two) will build one of the four habitats…